Off they go, then!

(He still hasn't asked about holding hands.)

Carissa can't read his mind. Though she is aware that paradigmatic flirting in most places involves physical contact so they can - brush against each other, maybe, in tight spaces, which she can probably find if she tries hard and believes in herself - oh, here's a servant's hallway, meant for halflings and very cozy -

I WOULD APPRECIATE INSTRUCTIONS TO THE TOWER AND WILL PAY YOU SOMETHING REASONABLE FOR THEM she thinks loudly at security.

Elias Abarco hates this particular girl by now but that's all the more reason to take a deal like that! "Door on your left," he whispers when she's far enough ahead Keltham won't hear it.

Carissa doesn't even expect to regret this! Asmodeus personally is interested in her trajectory!! 

The door on her left opens in her hand, though she wouldn't have expected it to, and it's a grand bedroom, with a four-poster bed with sweeping velvet drapes and a fireplace and a sitting room and a dog bed fancier than anything Carissa's ever slept on. And it has a staircase up, a neat little spiral staircase with carpeted steps. 

Bit weird and sparse for a bedroom, but everything here is like that.  "Stairs!  Is that as tower-promising as it looks to an outsider from another dimension?"

"In this dimension, too, stairs often lead up to towers."

It would be - wise to try to arrange incidental physical contact here? But she doesn't think of handholding because that's not really a thing.

Keltham has been thinking thoughts along not entirely dissimilar lines, and tries to match his steps to Carissa such that, if she was okay with that, they could try both going up these stairs in quite close proximity.  If she seems to be falling behind or pulling ahead, he won't fight that, of course.

No, no, they can go up the stairs together, brushing shoulders a slightly unnecessary amount. 

There's something profoundly strange here and she doesn't know what it is. Maybe it's just the role reversal, that usually people are trying to seduce her. Maybe it's just that he's very young, and she hasn't dated teenagers since she was one, mostly at the Worldwound the interesting people have a decade on her because that's what makes them interesting, all the magic they know....maybe an adult dath ilani would be running rings around all of them, and that's why Asmodeus picked a teenager -

And then they're out at the top of the tower. Cheliax is not industrially advanced enough to have light pollution. The sky is very bright and very clear. 

Dath ilan is too good at coordination to have either lots of aerosols in the atmosphere or lots of high-scattering non-red lights on at night all the time, and Keltham has ever been a tourist in clear cold high places where the stars are brighter yet.  It's not a new sight to him, except of course in the sense that -

"The patterns of the suns are different," Keltham murmurs.  He didn't get around to checking last night, with all the various rushes.  "I was wondering if this was a branched time of my own planet, in my own -" Taldane doesn't have a word that means galaxy - "larger structure of suns.  Didn't seem likely, but - anyway, it's definitely not."  Dath ilan doesn't have the notion of 'constellations' in quite the same way, but he doesn't see any of the patterns that a dath ilani would use to identify the Northern Star or Southern Center or the direction of a meteor shower.

"I think you're from farther away than any of those stars. A very good wizard can teleport to those, and not to dath ilan."

"That's - incredibly impressive, we were not ready to go anywhere and come back, not for a while, it would have been insanely expensive even by our own standards.  We built hugely powerful beams of light and used that to launch probes toward the second-nearest sun, just to get started on practicing, but they won't get to their destinations for a long time.  We did it just because we could, in the end, and not for - not for reasons, really."

"We were pretty sure there was nobody else anywhere near our neighborhood, in any sun close enough for light to travel to us from there.  People did some clever calculations saying that the aliens were probably a few billion years out, in our - simultaneity - all with logic and calculations that don't apply here at all, if your wizards can teleport there and back in less than years.  Find any people around the other suns, or is it all just lifeless other planets the way we'd deduced in our own world?"

"The other planets around our sun are all settled, but that's - happened at the same time as us, it wasn't an independent event. From farther than that, uh, I've heard it claimed the crashed ship that is quarantined in Numeria came from another sun but I don't know more about that. Aroden, when he was an epic hero, spent thousands of years looking, and came back with empty hands."

"It feels so unreal to think of that as being something one person does.  We'd have millions of people investigating a question like that, if a possible alien invasion had happened, it would take millions of people.  One person becoming powerful enough to go to the stars on their own is - a story you write and only sell to adults, because if you told it to children you'd be setting them up for disappointment when they learned how economics worked in real life.  This place really is magic, just like we tell it in stories where I come from."

- hand on his arm?

"I hope it doesn't seem - like an entirely horrible place to you. It needs some work, but - but it's work a person can do, if that's what you mean by 'magic', it doesn't take millions..."

He leans gently in that direction, which is hopefully a signal that it's fine.  "Eh, frankly it's pretty horrible.  So lots of room for improvement, and unspendably vast riches if I can figure out how to collect a five percent fee on five percent of the improvements."

His brain takes this moment to wonder if Owl's Wisdom would have something else to say about this stereotypically Keltham response, and Keltham tells it to shut up and come back later.  Also no, because that is who Keltham is in another world, on a basic level, and even if he later decides he was wrong about some things that won't poof him into an random average dath ilani.

It is much less horrible than dath ilan where people can die forever if their brains are destroyed - not having that argument because in her heart she suspects she'd lose it, probably a similar percentage of people manage to go to Abaddon and get eaten. And because having arguments isn't sexy. 

What to say, then, though. "Well, I've heard more unrealistic ambitions."

"Who is it that has me beat on this metric and how?  I may have to adjust my aim upwards."

"Some people are planning to run the Starstone as soon as they can fly and become a god or die trying!!"

"Nah, I'm more ambitious than that.  Some people succeed at running the Starstone, right?  And yet your world's still an enormous messy mess of messiness.  So fixing the world is obviously harder.  Plus, I mean, if you're going to die and go to an afterlife anyways, why wouldn't you run the Starstone?  How does that even take ambition and not just plain old opportunism?"

"The people who die running the Starstone don't always go to the afterlives. They usually do, but - every once in a while, one or two percent, they're just gone. No one knows what the difference is. It's not the chanciest chance you could take but - I'd just die, personally."

"Yeah, I haven't really been thinking about it because I reflexively decided that it was a Keeper sort of question but - I had a thing happen to me that was supposed to obliterate my own consciousness, and here I am.  It kind of suggests that maybe - people are in enough different places that there's always some of them left, whatever happens to them.  By the end of my biological lifespan I'll probably have the most expensive intelligence headband and the most expensive Owl's Wisdom headband, and maybe then I'll be able to think about that sensibly even if there's no Keepers around.  And then decide whether I want to go to the afterlife here that I seem to be headed for, or if I want to optimize for Neutral Evil, so I can go on to whatever place comes next in the sequence whose zero is dath ilan and whose first successor is Golarion."

"I - 

- that doesn't make any sense to me but I guess it wouldn't. I am - not very willing to trade off definitely not dying - against many other things."

"Woulda said the same, before I died in a plane crash that couldn't possibly have failed to utterly obliterate my brain.  I'm pretty sure I remember my head being ripped off my neck in the crash, before I found myself in Golarion instead.  I'm sure that sounds like small potatoes to your own standards of what people come back from, but where I come from it was supposed to be permanent."

"And it wasn't."

"Dying in a plane crash is something that you'd expect to obliterate every brain of every copy of you, across all the branches of branching time inside the universe as conventionally understood.  If there was still some of me left after that -"

"Well, it's suggestive of some weird things being true.  That would then, by shaky extrapolation, go on being true if something else happened that would otherwise obliterate my presence within Golarion as conventionally understood."

"But I'm not actually going to try to figure it out without more intelligence and wisdom headbands after I'm older, if those are actual options here.  Handing that job to your future self seems like the equivalent of saying to wait and ask a Keeper."

- nod. "My working theory has been that Asmodeus - grabbed a copy somehow or something - which would have been fantastically expensive but maybe still the best way to explain to us what we're doing wrong. I don't know if that changes any of your reasoning or if it's just true that some other god somewhere else might be grabbing people from Abaddon."

"Well, the obvious thought is that your universe is my universe's physics plus magic, and can see my universe from here, and by mediocrity is probably part of a vast lattice containing lots of other universes that can see my universe, and then this universe is one that's visible from universes that look like this universe plus even more magic, and maybe mostly when somebody dies in Abaddon nothing happens, but there's a vast number of double magical universes and some tiny fraction of those have a god or a glitch or a whatever that materializes another copy of the person who just got eaten."

"Assuming they get eaten quickly, and not by their minds getting chewed up a bit at a time so that their consciousness turns into a small painful simple thing before it ends.  There's a disease like that in dath ilan, that slowly degrades your consciousness if you let it run until it kills you, taking away your memories year by year.  People usually go into cryonic suspension immediately if they find out they have it.  I also need to know more about Abaddon, besides solving metaphysics, before I start treating Abaddon as an exit route."

"Seems worth noting though that if the gods also think that's how Abaddon works, that the people who end there just wake up someplace else the same as I did, it could explain why the gods aren't treating it as more of an emergency."